TheStreet: Crowdsourcing: Not Yet a Game-Changer for Small Biz

CHICAGO (TheStreet) -- Every few years, a new business model comes along that carries a certain in-the-know cache. Mention it casually in conversation or a meeting and you're signaling subtly that you're up on the latest innovation trends.

These days, "the crowd" is one of those buzzworthy business concepts. Harnessing the power of groups through online communication has already revolutionized standard models of publishing or marketing; think of Wikipedia's collaborative writing model, or the thousands of Twitter users who can sink a movie release if they all share bad reviews.

So it's no wonder some see great potential for crowdsourcing, a term that encompasses a variety of methods for handing off business tasks to the crowd. Theoretically, crowdsourcing allows small businesses to take advantage of a vastly wider talent pool while keeping costs down. But this virtual crowd, by its very nature, is an ever-changing, hard-to-pin-down concept. And while a few crowdsourcing applications have clear benefits for small businesses, the concept as a whole is still very much a work in progress.